Lessons From The Worm

So ten years ago...

Who would have possibly believed that North Korea would be arming down (allegedly, whatever) and Dennis Rodman would somehow be a player in the whole thing, showing up on television wearing (1) a "Make America Great Again" hat (because, y'know, Donald Trump is the US President) and (2) a t-shirt that endorses a cheesy knockoff of a mathematical discovery known as the distributed ledger which people are now using to transfer bits of data back and forth to each other's cell phones, enabling global commerce without any centralized point of verification or currency issuance.. ?

If you told someone that this would be a picture of what you'd see on YouTube, it would seem pretty far-fetched.

But then there's never a single day that stands out as especially far-fetched. It all just comes to happen and we gradually make sense of it.

Somewhere along the way it becomes vaguely normal that Dennis Rodman would be on TV billboarding a cryptocurrency while he plays a little hand in President Donald Trump's North Korea negotiations.

These changes are actually really small and superficial relative to what's coming, I'd imagine. It becomes more of an exponential rate. But, the concept is the same, that just because something doesn't seem like it would make sense as a possibility from where we stand now, it can develop in ways that we didn't anticipate and gradually fall into place as realistic and not that mind-bending.

Thank you for illustrating that for us, Worm.

North Korea

Brief little point on North Korea: I don't think "The US should arm down too" is useful or the right way to look at it.

Nukes shouldn't be a thing. Dangerous weapons shouldn't be a thing, and hopefully one day soon we have AI that can scan and know where they exist, and then it becomes reasonable to ban them (when you can guarantee other people don't have them).

As for right now, the US is more predictable and systematic. There's currently still tension in the world, to at least some degree. The US has plenty of enemies, who aren't guaranteed to behave peacefully or to not have a nuke. The end goal should be towards the US not having them too, but that doesn't need to be a direct 1-to-1 lockstep with what North Korea does.

Scaling down in step with Russia or China would be a more reasonable idea (tho still not necessarily how it has to work).

If hypothetically party A is less likely to trigger a nuke than party B, you should be more concerned with whether party B has them.

(The US commits its own sins, but those have more to do with occupying and picking on defenseless countries and butting into their affairs and whatnot. Tragic in its own right, but whether they're likely at all to initiate a nuke is a different thing.)

Leading by example is great when things are aligned correctly, but in the middle of a fight or once tension has begun, it could just be suicidal, until you can get to the point where you know it's safe now.

Which I imagine is what North Korea has been convinced of. They probably weren't ever wanting to initiate a nuke, but felt they needed them as long as they weren't sure if others might fire or boss them around too hard.

So it's just about listening to what people want and making sense of the motivations in play and coming to a deal that works for both sides. It doesn't have to be as boorish as "we both do X at the same time".

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photo credit: mspaint artwork is once again my own original; photo courtesy of Cable News Network via YouTube.com; shoutout also to the "Snipping Tool" that allowed me to carve out the screenshot off of YouTube